Kitchen Project #172: Almond Cake

The BFF to fruit and cream everywhere

Hello,

Welcome to today’s edition of Kitchen Projects. Thank you so much for being here.

With summer upon us, I've been thinking a lot about the best things to eat with abundant seasonal fruit. Today I’m excited to share the development journey into the world of almond cake, for a recipe that I hope will become a go-to this summer for entertaining.

Over on KP+, something a bit different but equally brilliant. Gooey corn tarts - based on the Portuguese milk tart, it is crispy on the outside and custardy in the middle. For lovers of canele, i have to say these are certainly one of the tastiest things I’ve made lately. Click here to read it.

What’s KP+? Well, it’s the level-up version of this newsletter. By joining KP+, you will support the writing and research that goes into the newsletter (including the commissioning - and fair payment - of all the writers), join a growing community, access extra content (inc. the entire archive) and more. Subscribing is easy and only costs £6 per month or £50 a year. Why not give it a go? Come and join the gang!

Love,
Nicola

A Forever Cake

I should really draw a graph depicting the ratio between the changing seasons and my ‘easiness to please.’; In the winter, I fuss endlessly with puff pastry, have the motivation to make hundreds of biscuits and spend hours constructing the perfect bread. In summer, I usually want nothing more than a simple slice of cake, a little fruit and a dollop of cream, and few cakes please me more than an almond cake.

The thing is, ‘almond cake’ is a description so generic that I may as well have just said ‘cake’. I wonder what pops into your mind when you hear those two words? Is it a creamy-rich financier or a light and sticky Tarta de Santiago? Is it gluten-free (as almond cakes often are) or bolstered with flour?

Sitting down to write this newsletter, I realise that almond cake is the head of an entire family tree, not just a capillary of cake itself. So, when I say I dream of almond cake, what am I even talking about?

plush, soft crmb!

For me: A rich, tender rubbly sponge with slightly frilly crisp edges, perfectly golden and soft. It has a confident almond flavour which begs you to mingle it with fruit and cream. It can also hold its own served in a plush wedge, perhaps with a little icing sugar on top. Have I ever eaten this specific almond cake? No, not exactly. But surely I can will it into existence with a combination of determination and Excel spreadsheets.

To hone in and develop this week’s recipe, I decided to take a closer look at the vast world of almond cakes, segueing through alternative nuts and comparing almonds in all their form, to edge closer to the imagined version in my head. In the end, a recipe for my perfect, slightly sticky, plush almond cake with a crisp top and wantonly bumpy top and frilly edge that you will delight in eating all summer and beyond.

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Over on KP+, I wanted to develop an alternative delivery medium for the season’s best and I’ve ended up with one of my most favourite recipes I’ve ever developed?! Gooey Corn Tarts. Inspired portuguese milk tarts, these are crispy-edged creamy joy, with a custardy gooey centre for those that love canele and mochi-like textures (these use regular flour though!). I cannot tell you how addictive these are, with a rounded sweetcorn-infused flavour that feels distinctly like summer is here:

Corn Tarts!

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Are you nuts?

Let’s begin at the very beginning. What is a nut? To quote the ever-wise Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food, “Nuts are impossible to define in a manner which would be compatible with popular usage yet acceptable to botanists.” Oh dear. This is why peanuts are often called nuts, despite being legumes. That said, it’s agreed that most things we consider nuts have a lot in common - pretty high in fat, usually above 50%, relatively high in protein and, once processed, very little water content.

Almonds, our nut in question, are a tree nut that have been cultivated for thousands of years and have a rich history. You’ll find Almonds in medical texts written by Hippocrates, the medieval Arabic cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh, the Bible and Torah (ten mentions!), and even in several competing Greek myths (the separately tragic stories of Phyllis and Agdistis). Pretty stacked CV, right?

But the first thing we need to ask ourselves is why we are adding almonds in the first place. Flavour? Texture? Both give clues to developing an almond cake.

the crumb of today’s cake

You can replace a proportion of any recipe’s flour with ground almonds, or throw a few into the batter, as a way to improve the moisture and tenderness of a cake thanks to that high fat content. But this does not an almond cake make. And what’s the flavour of an almond anyway?

Almond trees have two main varieties - bitter and sweet. Sweet almond trees produce the nuts we eat. Bitter almond trees produce a kernel with cyanide that, eaten in vast quantities, can make you seriously ill. These kernels can be processed with heat and thanks to their high proportion of benzaldehydes, produce the intensely perfumed safe-to-consume almond essence.

You could, in theory, make an almond flavoured cake without almonds, though you might dispute whether the bitter almond represents the sweet almond flavour at all. There is another almond-like interloper: Noyaux, the kernel inside apricots, which boast the aroma of almonds (you can read about this in detail in this brilliant deep dive by Camilla Wynne - they are also somewhat toxic). In China, farmers cultivate apricots especially for this kernel - it is known as the ‘chinese almond’.

Behaviour in baking

Unlike other ingredients like flour and eggs, which transform when heated in the oven, nuts don’t undergo any change. So, when we add ground almonds into our batter, with their soft rubbly texture and nutty flavour, they come out pretty much as they went in. Sure, they’ve absorbed liquid, but they ultimately remain the soft, fatty and tender nubs that we love, but now interspersed in a web of cake. Behaving somewhat similarly to starch, in that it absorbs moisture (though doesn’t gelatinise or ‘firm up’ in the same way at a certain temperature), almonds are popular in gluten-free baking, though many cakes use both almond and wheat to create the most ideal, stable structure.

close up + roasted bluberries

From frangipane to macarons, amaretti to whole-orange cakes, there’s no shortage of recipes that use almonds. Head to any supermarket and the only pre-ground nut you’ll find is almonds.

So why have almonds become so popular and not, say, walnuts? Some sources suggest that their mild flavour and balanced fat profile might be the reason, but take a sniff of a good quality marzipan made with sweet almonds or (bitter) almond essence and you’d say the aroma was anything but mild. Perhaps because almonds were one of the earliest cultivated trees which were simultaneously farmed across Europe and Western Asia as cuisines and cultural traditions, which still influence our cooking today, were being developed. The mentions in the Bible, Torah and Greek mythology probably helped, too. I mean, who doesn’t want to eat the food of the Gods?

The Cakes

To understand the lay of the land, I researched popular European almond cakes, including the beloved and much replicated Almond Torte developed by Lindsay Shere for Chez Panisse. The recipe appears in the Chez Panisse Desserts book first published in 1985. It utilises almond paste, a shelf stable product that is about 50/50 almonds and sugar (with a bit of syrup and water) which I converted into ground almonds and sugar - we’ll get to almond sources later.

I also mixed up batches of Gateau Nantais, a dense french almond cake typical of Nantes, a Pain de Gênes (bread of Genoa), a French low flour and egg raised almond cake, Torta de Mandorle, a light airy Italian almond cake, a Swedish Mazarinkage, the iconic Spanish Tarta de Santiago, as well as a financier, a batch of frangipane and mixture of equal parts butter, egg, flour, almond and sugar as a control. I decided to forgo the airy joconde type sponge, popular in French patisserie for layering in cakes - just not what I was after this week! I also did not mix in any of the suggested flavorings, like almond essence, citrus or spices. This was a pure investigation into form.

Quick disclaimer - I realise there is probably huge variation within each of these, so I just had to pick what I felt was the most popular/most recreated ‘type’ within each cake category. If any of the recipes I picked don’t represent what you know each to be, let me know! I’d be keen to hear.

Let’s see the spread:

Almond cakes, pre cut!

I was surprised at the vast spread of the cakes - from the enhanced-victoria-sponge-like almond torte to the sticky and gooey Tarta de Santiago, to the flavourful, light and dry torta di Mandorle, I thought this exercise would provide me with answers, but actually it just gave me more questions! There were some clear differences - the recipes that relied on baking powder and creamed butter and sugar for leavening, rather than whipped eggs, have a different finish as well as internal structure and eating quality.

An array of almond cakes

The air-leavened Pain de Gênes was like a thick soft chewy pound cake, while the frangipane and financier were predictably buttery and rich. The Mazarinkage had a pleasant stickiness to it though it lacked almond flavour. In the lead with intense almond aroma was the Gateau Nantais. So what was going on?

When you develop a recipe for a cake, with a focus on one specific aroma or texture, you need to look at which ingredients enhance and which distract. I started to arrange the cakes in different orders to compare the ratio of ingredients. I wondered if sugar was a factor - marzipan has certainly taught us that sugar is a great carrier of almond aroma.

least nuts to most nuts

The Gateau Nantais, with an almond flavour significant enough for me to note it down, was actually on the low side (18%) of nuts proportionally; what was going on?! Flour, which has a neutral flavour, may also have the effect of dampening the aroma of the almonds.

least fat to most fat

Both the almond torte and mazarinkage had a more neutral flavour despite having a similar proportion of nuts, sugar as the gateau nantais, both had double the flour. The almond torte is originally made with almond paste, which possibly has more flavour than ground almonds due to processing (Sarah Johnson, who made a variant on the Chez Panisse cake in her excellent book Fruitful also opts to add almond liqueur to her cake) while the recipe for Mazarinkage that I used calls for almond extract. Figures!

Least flour to most flour

The cakes I liked the most had relatively low - if not zero - flour and definitely more almonds than flour, along with plenty of fat. I loved the air leavened cakes, but they didn’t line up with my original almond cake vision for this week, so started to work toward a recipe that had the stickiness of the financier and Tarta de Santiago, but the homeliness and buttery hug of the Gateau Nantais.

What about other nuts?

If I was a cat, I'd certainly have used up all my lives because every week writing this newsletter for the last few years, my curiosity gets the better of me. Every. Single. Time. I know we’ve established that this is a newsletter very much about almonds, but I kept wondering - is there are a reason that we don’t bake with other nuts?

I decided to mix up cakes, based on the Gateau Nantais ratio which has 2.5x nuts to flour and had impressed me in the tests, of a variety of nuts: Brazil, pistachio, cashew, walnut, hazelnut, pecan, macadamia and - because why not? - sesame (a seed, not a nut. Confusingly nuts are all seeds, but not all seeds are nuts. You can see why Alan Davidson was wary of the botanists!).

I consulted the nut table in SIFT, pg.55 to compare the average fat content of the nuts (from low 40% to 70%) then, to level the playing field, adjusted the recipe via the butter so each cake had the same amount of total fat. This way, the richness of the pecan (around 70%!!!) wouldn’t overly influence the texture of the cake.

So, as it turns out, there is no good reason not to be using any and all nuts in your cakes. The textures did vary, though in such small tests, I have to question if I had over enthusiastically ground one nut and released more oils, compared to another, or whipped the butter a little more. Compared to all the other distinctly flavourful cakes, the almond seemed generic and mass produced. The walnut had a fruity quality, while the macadamia and brazil were pleasantly creamy though quite neutral. The pecan was unbelievably tasty and best believe I’ll be revisiting in more detail come Autumn. I can only imagine the results if you were to toast these nuts before processing, too! More to come on this subject.

What kind of almonds?

Once I’d started to hone in on my final recipe, I realised there was another hurdle: The amount of almond products available to the modern baker is quite overwhelming.

Standard, powdery ground almonds can be bought in most supermarkets (flour or ground almonds tends to be blanched and without skin, while almond meal may have the skin, too) but you can buy specialist ground almonds made from premium nuts, like sicilian almonds, online pretty easily too.

Then there’s the Marcona almond, a special wide flat almond from Spain, beloved for their buttery sweet flavour. You also have the option to blend your own skin-on or toasted almonds (cooked and cooled before blending) as well as the pastes - harder to acquire at least in the UK) mandelmassa/almond paste with its equal nut to sugar ratio, as well as shop bought marzipan (which has 25/75 split of nuts to sugar).

I mixed up a test batch of each cake to see how each version of almond impacted the cake:

Overall, the cakes were sticky and pleasingly plush.

Well, the clear problem child here is the marzipan cake. The extreme ratio of sugar to almond was not appropriate for the cake I’d developed, which prioritised almond quantity. The high proportion of sugar (a tenderiser) was overwhelming to the structure of the cake so it lifted and fell. It was actually quite fun to eat - sticky and rich, but not a candidate for my cake.

The best flavour came from the fancy Sicilian ground almond, the marcona and the almond paste. The skin-on almonds had a well-rounded flavour while the toasted nuts gave the cake a rich flavour reminiscent of peanut butter. I was surprised that the texture was also impacted - the classic ground almonds had a spongy quality, while the fancier ones had a richer texture. However, the almonds I was grinding myself also seemed to be sensitive to sinking - we’ll talk about that below.

I was quite annoyed to see that the hard to get, speciality mandelmassa baked into a cake that was beautifully even and golden. How annoying! What was happening there? The ingredients include syrup and glucose syrup. It is also possible that the mix is less aerated since we are mixing already ‘spoken for’ sugar in the form of the paste. The crystals just aren’t cutting through the butter.

Translating the final recipe

While my mini loaf pans are brilliant for getting a basic idea of how a cake behaves, not all recipes that work well in miniature translate to larger sizes. In miniature size, I’d found the ‘ideal’ ratio and also added a nifty process folding in whipped egg whites to improve the profile of the cake.

whipped egg whites folded through on top!

But baked in my 8inch tin? AGH. The first test was a bit of a disaster, much too fatty and collapsing. I adjusted - still not right, then again too far in the cake-y direction (a delight, but not right for my original vision). But no matter what the one made with the freshly ground almonds seemed to threaten to collapse. What was happening?

The rise and fall

Since almond cakes have an overall lower proportion of gluten and starch, two main structure builders in cake, the chance of them rising and falling is higher. We need to be sensitive about how much we aerate the batter during the mixing process. We get a lot of lift from the egg whites and raising agents, so overly enthusiastic creaming isn’t crucial here.

The cakes with the lowest amount of flour also tended to have the highest proportion of eggs, our other main structure builder. The Tarta di Santiago, with 0% flour has 33% eggs, while the Pain de Gênes has 4% flour to 30% eggs. The Torta di Mandorle has 9% flour to 41% eggs, and zero fat.

Almonds add bulk and texture along with fat which provides the moist and tender texture. They don’t provide any real elasticity to the cake, like gluten or eggs do, firming up through the baking process, but they do have a role in absorbing liquid that is not unlike a starch. This is why you can use almond flour to thicken or set a fruit pie (see here!).

While grinding your own almond flour is nice in theory, there are a few problems that can arise. Compared to industrial grinding practices and mills, a food processor is practically prehistoric; the blade heats up easily and the high fat nuts can easily become greasy. A few pulses too many and you’re on your way to nut butter. Industrial mills use minimal friction which keeps the nut at a low temperature. The nuts are also fully dried before grinding to prevent any additional moisture in the final product. To try and get the best results at home, you could try freezing the nuts before blitzing as an insurance policy. The meal should feel powdery and dry, not oily, sticky or clumpy.

The second issue is the size of the grounds - if you don’t pass the nuts through a sieve, you’ll be left with 1mm size pieces, which sounds small until you think that commercially produced almond meal is 250–400 μm (micrometres). More fine particles of almond means the meal or flour has a higher surface area and, in theory, is more absorbent and can behave more like flour. You want that fine powdery texture otherwise it won’t absorb moisture in the cake, meaning it may end up greasy or unbalanced.

In my tests, I found that self-ground nuts were also less stable (other than the skin on almonds - perhaps the extra fibre?) when baked - the cakes made with freshly ground nuts tended to dip a little in the centre, while those made with the powdery, pre-ground nuts.

in my mind this was sunken at a really aggressive angle but its just a little dip!

I will admit the aroma of the freshly ground nut cakes was more intense - the compounds held in the nuts are freshly released meaning the scent is more appealing than a pre-ground nut that has been held in cold storage for months. It also has a richer, stickier texture which I can absolutely recommend.

Depth matters

the two batter sizes - shallower on left, deeper on right.

I’ve tested this cake several times in an 8 inch tin with varying batter quantities and it bakes delightfully in both but with slightly different character. I quite like the elegant thin cake, so reduce the recipe by 1/3rd (making it a two egg batter - multiply each ingredient by 0.7 for the cleanest numbers) for a thinner profile and overall chewier (in a good way!) bite, if that sounds like your vibe. Reduce the bake time to 30 minutes.

What about gluten-free?

the gluten free variant

Almond cake has become synonymous with gluten free baking. I have tested this recipe with gluten free flour in the smaller batch size described above and it worked beautifully, though next time i’d add a pinch of xanthan gum to help prevent any sinking in the centre.

If you are looking for a great gluten free cake here on the newsletter, try this apricot almond cake or Brian Levy’s 1/8th Irish Cake. I also think the Tarta de Santiago is the perfect gluten free almond cake!

The recipe: Almond Cake

Makes 1 x 8-inch sponge [see note in “depth matters” above about making a smaller cake size]

Ingredients

• 160g Unsalted butter, soft and at room temp 20c

• 200g Caster sugar

• 125g Ground almonds*

• 3g Fine sea salt (kosher salt or flaky also works)

• 160g Whole eggs, about 3

• ¼ tsp almond extract (optional)

• 1 tsp vanilla extract (optional)

• 80g Plain flour (see above re GF flour)

• 4g Baking powder

To serve: whipped cream or creme fraiche, seasonal fruit, macerated with a little sugar or lightly cooked (these roasted blueberries by Sarah Johnson are perfect)

*If you are grinding your own almonds, grind the nuts until sand-like then pass through a sieve. Only process for the minimum time or else the nuts begin to release their oils and the cake can end up greasy. Don’t include the chunks! You can use skin-on.

Method

• Preheat the oven to 160c fan. Line an 8 inch round tin.

• Cream together the butter, sugar, almonds and salt together on medium speed for 45 seconds - 1 minute until aerated. Scrape down the side of the bowl.

• Separate the eggs, putting the whites into a large bowl. Mix the yolks into the butter/sugar mixture. Sift over the plain flour and baking powder and mix until the flour is about 80% incorporated. It will look more like biscuit or shortcrust pastry dough at this point.

• Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form then fold, in two goes, into the cake batter until no streaks of egg white remain.

• Scrape batter into the prepared tin, smooth it then bake for 30-35 minutes or until the cake is light golden, springs back when pressed and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

• Move onto a rack and when the tin is cool enough to handle, remove and leave to cool completely. Once cool, you can dust with icing sugar if desired.

• Serve in thick slices, topped with cream and fruit as you desire.